Moonwalking With Einstein (14 page)

With most things in the Universe
I am happy:
Supernovas
The Horse Head Nebula
The Crab
The light-years-big clouds
That are the Womb of Stars

It went on to list the many things Tony Buzan was happy about, including “God’s freezing balls,” and ended:

I am not happy
That Ted
Is Dead.

The competitors had fifteen minutes to memorize as many lines as possible, and then a half hour to write them on a blank sheet of paper. In order to receive full credit for a line, it had to be rendered perfectly, down to each capital letter and punctuation mark. Competitors who failed to underscore just how “not happy” the author was or who mistakenly thought that Ted was “dead” without a capital D would get only half the total points for that line.

The question of how best to memorize a piece of text, or a speech, has vexed mnemonists for millennia. The earliest memory treatises described two types of recollection:
memoria rerum
and
memoria verborum
, memory for things and memory for words. When approaching a text or a speech, one could try to remember the gist, or one could try to remember verbatim. The Roman rhetoric teacher Quintilian looked down on
memoria verborum
on the grounds that creating such a vast number of images was not only inefficient, since it would require a gargantuan memory palace, but also unstable. If your memory for a speech hinged on knowing every word, then not only did you have a lot more to remember, but if you forgot a single word, you could end up trapped in a room of your memory palace staring at a blank wall, lost and unable to move on.

Cicero agreed that the best way to memorize a speech is point by point, not word by word, by employing
memoria rerum
. In his
De Oratore
, he suggests that an orator delivering a speech should make one image for each major topic he wants to cover, and place each of those images at a locus. Indeed, the word “topic” comes from the Greek word
topos
, or place. (The phrase “in the first place” is a vestige from the art of memory.)

Perfect recall of words is something our brains simply aren’t very good at, a fact famously illustrated in the congressional Watergate hearings of 1973. In his testimony before the Senate Watergate Investigating Committee, President Richard Nixon’s counsel John Dean reported to the congressmen on the contents of dozens of meetings related to the cover-up of the break-in. To the president’s chagrin and the committee’s delight, Dean was able to repeat verbatim many conversations that had taken place in the Oval Office. His recollections were so detailed and seemingly so precise that reporters took to calling him “the human tape recorder.” At the time, it hadn’t yet been revealed that there had been an actual tape recorder in the Oval Office recording the conversations that Dean had reconstructed from memory.

While the rest of the country took note of the political implications of those tape recordings, the psychologist Ulric Neisser saw them as a valuable data trove. Neisser compared the transcripts of the recordings with Dean’s testimony, and analyzed what Dean’s memory got right and what it got wrong. Not only did Dean not remember specific quotes correctly—that is to say,
verborum
—he often didn’t even properly remember the gist of what had been discussed
—rerum
. But even when his memories were wrong in isolated episodes, notes Neisser, “there is a sense in which he was altogether right.” The major themes of his testimony were all accurate: “Nixon wanted the cover-up to succeed; he was pleased when it went well; he was troubled when it began to unravel; he was perfectly willing to consider illegal activities if they would extend his power or confound his enemies.” John Dean did not misrepresent, argues Neisser; he did get the details wrong, but he got the important stuff right. We all do the same thing when we try to recount conversations, because without special training our memories tend to only pay attention to the big picture.

It makes sense that our brains would work like that. The brain is a costly organ. Though it accounts for only 2 percent of the body’s mass, it uses up a fifth of all the oxygen we breathe, and it’s where a quarter of all our glucose gets burned. The brain is the most energetically expensive piece of equipment in our body, and has been ruthlessly honed by natural selection to be efficient at the tasks for which it evolved. One might say that the whole point of our nervous system, from the sensory organs that feed information to the glob of neurons that interprets it, is to develop a sense of what is happening in the present and what will happen in the future, so that we can respond in the best possible way. Strip away the emotions, the philosophizing, the neuroses, and the dreams, and our brains, in the most reductive sense, are fundamentally prediction and planning machines. And to work efficiently, they have to find order in the chaos of possible memories. From the vast amounts of data pouring in through the senses, our brains must quickly sift out which information is likely to have some bearing on the future, attend to that, and ignore the noise. Much of the chaos that our brains filter out is words, because more often than not, the actual language that conveys an idea is just window dressing. What matters is the
res
, the meaning of those words. And that’s what our brains are so good at remembering. In real life, it’s rare that anyone is asked to recall
ad verbum
outside of congressional depositions and the poetry event at an international memory competition.

Until the last tick
of history’s clock, cultural transmission meant oral transmission, and poetry, passed from mouth to ear, was the principle medium of moving information across space and from one generation to the next. Oral poetry was not simply a way of telling lovely or important stories, or of flexing the imagination. It was, argues the classicist Eric Havelock, “a massive repository of useful knowledge, a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment.” The great oral works transmitted a shared cultural heritage, held in common not on bookshelves, but in brains.

Professional memorizers have existed in oral cultures throughout the world to transmit that heritage through the generations. In India, an entire class of priests was charged with memorizing the Vedas with perfect fidelity. In pre-Islamic Arabia, people known as
Rawis
were often attached to poets as official memorizers. The Buddha’s teachings were passed down in an unbroken chain of oral tradition for four centuries until they were committed to writing in Sri Lanka in the first century B.C. And for centuries, a group of hired tape recorders called
tannaim
(literally, “reciters”) memorized the oral law on behalf of the Jewish community.

The most famous of the Western tradition’s oral works, and the first to have been systematically studied, were Homer’s
Odyssey
and
Iliad
. These two poems—possibly the first to have been written down in the Greek alphabet—had long been held up as literary archetypes. However, even as they were celebrated as the models to which all literature should aspire, Homer’s masterworks had also long been the source of scholarly unease. The earliest modern critics sensed that they were somehow qualitatively different from everything that came after—even a little strange. For one thing, both poems were oddly repetitive in the way they referred to characters. Odysseus was always “clever Odysseus.” Dawn was always “rosy-fingered.” Why would someone write like that? Sometimes the epithets seemed completely off-key. Why call the murderer of Agamemnon “blameless Aegisthos”? Why refer to “swift-footed Achilles” even when he was sitting down? Or to “laughing Aphrodite” even when she was in tears? In terms of both structure and theme, the
Odyssey
and
Iliad
were also oddly formulaic, to the point of predictability. The same narrative units—gathering armies, heroic shields, challenges between rivals—pop up again and again, only with different characters and different circumstances. In the context of such finely spun, deliberate masterpieces, these quirks seemed hard to explain.

At the heart of the unease about these earliest works of literature were two fundamental questions: First, how could Greek literature have been born ex nihilo with two masterpieces? Surely a few less perfect stories must have come before, and yet these two were among the first on record. And second, who exactly was their author? Or was it authors? There were no historical records of Homer, and no trustworthy biography of the man exists beyond a few self-referential hints embedded in the texts themselves.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the first modern critics to suggest that Homer might not have been an author in the contemporary sense of a single person who sat down and wrote a story and then published it for others to read. In his 1781
Essay on the Origin of Languages
, the Swiss philosopher suggested that the
Odyssey
and
Iliad
might have been “written only in men’s memories. Somewhat later they were laboriously collected in writing”—though that was about as far as his inquiry into the matter went. Also writing in the eighteenth century, an English diplomat and archaeologist named Robert Wood suggested that Homer was illiterate, and that his works had to have been committed to memory. It was a revolutionary theory, but Wood couldn’t back it up with a hypothesis that explained how Homer might have pulled off such an astounding mnemonic feat.

In 1795, the German philologist Friedrich August Wolf argued for the first time that not only were Homer’s works not
written down
by Homer, but they also weren’t even
by
Homer. They were, rather, a loose collection of songs transmitted by generations of Greek bards, and only redacted in their present written form at some later date.

In 1920, an eighteen-year-old scholar named Milman Parry took up the question of Homeric authorship as his master’s thesis at the University of California, Berkeley. He suggested that the reason Homer’s epics seemed unlike other literature was because they
were
unlike other literature. Parry had discovered what Wood and Wolf had missed: the evidence that the poems had been transmitted orally was right there in the text itself. All those stylistic quirks, including the formulaic and recurring plot elements and the bizarrely repetitive epithets—“clever Odysseus” and “gray-eyed Athena”—that had always perplexed readers were actually like thumbprints left by a potter: material evidence of how the poems had been crafted. They were mnemonic aids that helped the bard(s) fit the meter and pattern of the line, and remember the essence of the poems. The greatest author of antiquity was actually, Parry argued, just “one of a long tradition of oral poets that ... composed wholly without the aid of writing.”

Parry realized that if you were setting out to create memorable poems, the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
were exactly the kinds of poems you’d create. It’s said that clichés are the worst sin a writer can commit, but to an oral bard, they were essential. The very reason that clichés so easily seep into our speech and writing—their insidious memorability—is exactly why they played such an important role in oral storytelling. And the
Odyssey
and
Iliad
, excuse the cliché, are riddled with them. In a culture dependent on memory, it’s critical, in the words of Walter Ong, that people “think memorable thoughts.” The brain best remembers things that are repeated, rhythmic, rhyming, structured, and above all easily visualized. The principles that the oral bards discovered, as they sharpened their stories through telling and retelling, were the same basic mnemonic principles that psychologists rediscovered when they began conducting their first scientific experiments on memory around the turn of the twentieth century: Words that rhyme are much more memorable than words that don’t; concrete nouns are easier to remember than abstract nouns; dynamic images are more memorable than static images; alliteration aids memory. A striped skunk making a slam dunk is a stickier thought than a patterned mustelid engaging in athletic activity.

The most useful of all the mnemonic tricks employed by the bards was song. As anyone who has ever found himself chanting “By Mennen!” can attest, if you can turn a set of words into a jingle, they can become exceedingly difficult to knock out of your head.

Finding patterns and structure in information is how our brains extract meaning from the world, and putting words to music and rhyme are a way of adding extra levels of pattern and structure to language. It’s the reason Homeric bards sang their epic oral poems, the reason that the Torah is marked up with little musical notations, and the reason we teach kids the alphabet in a song and not as twenty-six individual letters. Song is the ultimate structuring device for language.